Kosovo is a province of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It has cultural roots that extend far back into the earliest moments of European history. Prior to historical records, it is believed that peoples from the Mediterranean area settled the region around Kosovo, perhaps the original Ilirians from what later would become modern Albania. Over the last 2,000 years the area has seen successive waves of settlers and conquerors including the Greeks, Romans, Slavs and Turks.

This pattern of settlement left a rich mosaic of cultures over the centuries -- Moslem Turks and Albanians, Orthodox and Moslem Slavs, Catholic Albanians and a small minority of Roma people (Europe's Gypsies) from central Asia. The 300 years leading up to 1900 were marked by a period of fairly stable and expanding Turkish rule under the Ottoman Empire. Some of the laws and customs of Kosovo today are translated down from this period. The prevalence of Islam and the pervasive mosques date also from this time. Kosovo was principally an agricultural and trade center with a lengthy history of mining for several kinds of valuable ore and coal.

Political and economic turmoil at the turn of the 20th century led to the eviction of the Ottoman Turks and the incorporation of the province into the political union of Yugoslavia, a predominately Slavic and Catholic state. Out of the events and aftermath of two world wars, which pitted European powers and Balkan state alliances against each other, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia -- led by Josip Broz Tito -- emerged. Tito established a Communist state composed of four federal republics and two autonomous provinces -- one of which was Kosovo. He later became a leader of the nonaligned nations and presided over a relatively stable and economically healthy country until his death in 1980.

In 1986 Slobodan Milosevic, a strong promoter of Serbian nationalism, became the leader of the Serbian Communist Party and was then elected president of Serbia in 1986. In 1989, the Serbian Republic and the government in Belgrade imposed a quasi-apartheid system on the province excluding ethnic Albanians from civil affairs, education and the normal conduct of the economy. This was to have a devastating impact on their society. Parallel systems were developed to assist the Albanian people and a strong political movement centered around Ibrahim Rugova sought political solutions to the problem at the international level.

At the regional level, declarations of independence by many of Yugoslavia's republics led to civil war in Croatia in 1991 and in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, both of which have large Serb minorities. Milosevic was widely blamed for providing financial and military backing to nationalist Serbs fighting in Croatia and Bosnia. Trade sanctions imposed by the United Nations in 1992 had a devastating impact on Serbia's economy. In 1994, Milosevic broke ties with the Serb leadership in Bosnia and in 1995 he signed the Dayton Peace Accord, bringing that war to an end.

By 1998, however, consecutive wars in the region and growing dissatisfaction with the quasi-apartheid system had propelled a more militant group of Albanians to seek solutions to the situation in Kosovo in violent ways. This led to the stepping up of the repression from Serbia and the deterioration of the situation in the winter of 1998-99. The collapse of political negotiations in Rambouillet, France in February 1999, led to open conflict with the now active Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and with NATO in March 1999.